1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to the field of communications, in particular, to a unified communication system that integrates different kinds of communication channels, applications, data types and data sources.
2. Technical Background
At present, there are more and more communication devices, each of which has own unique convenience. Consequently, a person may have many ways for getting in touch with others and, as a result, has many numbers to be remembered, such as a mobile telephone number, a home telephone number, an office telephone number, a facsimile telephone number, one or more electronic mail box addresses and so on. From the viewpoint of convenience, a user hopes to be able to get information sent to him with any kind of communication device at any time and any place and hopes the information sent by him will be received by the receiver eventually.
For the first requirement, with respect to the issue that different devices have different addresses, a Unified Messaging System (UMS) has been proposed. The Unified Messaging System coordinates audio mails, electronic mails and facsimiles so that all of the messages are stored in the same location and may be accessed from different devices, including telephone sets and PC computers. This system enables a user to be able to use one single device to manage all messages and multiple devices can access this device to get these messages. For instance, a user in a vehicle can use a mobile telephone to send and/or receive electronic mails, or search audio mails and facsimiles with a computer.
For the second requirement, different devices need to be routed from one to another and information needs to be converted from one to another in order to make the information be received finally by a user, which is the so called Unified Communication System (UCS). The UCS system adds a ‘person-to-person’ communication function over the UMS's ‘machine-to-machine’ interaction. A user may define what device at what time will be the primary communication device, and information sent to other devices may be transferred to this device; the user may further define filtering criteria for received information. Thus, for each person, only one of his numbers needs to be remembered for sending information to him.
In order to achieve the goal of ‘person-to-person’ communication of the Unified Communication System, the first technical issue to be addressed is how to integrate the conventional telecommunication services with the rapidly developing Web application, that is, to establish a unified platform so as to make different kinds of messages (such as audio, video, text, animation, etc.) be routed between different kinds of devices through corresponding communication channels (including synchronous communication channel supporting two party call and conferencing, half-synchronous communication channel supporting instant messaging and push to talk, and asynchronous communication channel supporting electronic mail and multimedia message) and finally arrive at the user.
Conventional telecommunication systems, such as a circuit and packet switched systems, use a signaling protocol, such as SS7, and a specific architecture that is quite different from the web based architecture to control a communication session. As a result, it is difficult to realize a unified communication function based on a conventional telecommunication system and to make the rapidly developing Web technology to be the core technology.
With the development of the IP networks, it is already possible to integrate IP based services into the telecommunication system. At present, many standards have been defined for creating an IP based multimedia communication system. A typical one of them is IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), defined by the 3rd Generation Mobile Communication Standard Partnership Project (3GPP). IMS uses an IP network, such as GPRS, as a carrier to provide a unified platform for IP multimedia services. 3GPP IMS applies a hierarchical architecture, which is divided into three layers, that is, service network layer, IP multimedia core network layer and access network layer. The access network supports many kinds of techniques, including 3GPP GPRS, WLAN and others, for providing management of accessing and mobilization. The IP multimedia core network is based on a simple control protocol (SIP) and supports Ipv6. The IP multimedia core network is responsible for session control of the multimedia services, providing QoS support and billing management. The service network provides techniques for many kinds of services, promoting the development of multimedia services through the opened service interface and SIP. While this kind of system may support many kinds of application servers, such as servers for providing conventional telephone service as well as application servers for providing non-conventional telephone services, such as instant messaging, video streaming and multimedia messaging, they only functionally expand the IP network and related techniques and still follow the working way of the conventional telecommunication system. For instance, the architecture and basic concepts are still based on the signaling protocol. In such systems, Web technique is only a supplemental rather than a core technique, for instance, Web technique is always used to enhance a user interface (UI) and expand applications.
With the further development of Web technique, people more and more rely on Web based applications. In order to meet the ‘person-to-person’ communication requirement of the unified communication system, instead of being a kind of supplementation, the Web technique should become the core technique of such systems. So, it is strongly desirable to have a Web based unified communication system and methods.
Besides, Web based collaborated applications (such as electronic white board) have become more and more popular, whereas the media interaction capability of different kinds of pervasive computing devices is rather limited. So, it is also strongly desirable to have a system and methods for making different kinds of devices able to work in collaboration with each other so as to perform collaborated applications.